A day in the life; missing my shotgun

Today has just been..you know, one of those menial wastes of times (I swear I sat in that office for years today) in which we all question our existence and admit our futility at well, everything.
The biggest kicks I got today were by stealing post-its and staplers from work because, let's face it, I probably won't be hired back next year after this morning:
I've been ill once (and so didn't come in) and late another morning- so far so...okay. But I was late again this morning, too, and had to come up with some rambling excuse that the family dog (the one I was deigned too irresponsible to look after) had gotten the shits in the middle of the night, and I'd woken up to it this morning (stick to what you know when you're lying - obviously everyone in the family thought this was a likely situation).
Sure, my boss sympathised, but I definitely went a bit too far at replying to his "Well, I suppose something like that is completely out of your hands." with: "Oh, I don't know about that if you get what I mean..."
Yeah, I think he did.
So I've had pretty much no lunchbreak and have spent the entire day single handedly bringing down Mongolia with the amount of papers I have to print and file. Printing is a surprisingly difficult job, the whole two-sided to one-sided thing, and vice-versa, boggles me. I almost asked a co-worker's help but I doubt she'd have appreciated the fact that it was my CV I was trying to spice up.
Having been practically injecting coffee into my veins to stay alive - correct, alive - today I was thinking about the whole graduation steps we take from childhood to adulthood. The first day I had my coffee black, the way my mum does, I knew I had just bypassed my twenties entirely and skipped straight to bitter. My gagging-for-the-future-friend put milk in what I thought was my coffee yesterday and I almost burst right into tears. I'm a woman now - 'A moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips.'
What the hell does it matter to her, she's looking forward to pregnancy.


Becoming a woman is like joining a religion - there are so many things you can simply no longer do or pull off anymore. Take grazing your knees: I was a big one for that when I was a kid because I was one of those tomboy-type things that my parents hoped would fall out of a tree and be finally be silenced - perfectly understandable. But if you have grazed knees now as an adult people are either going to think you were involved in some spontaneous sex act or you can't walk in heels. The latter scares me the most - how embarassing, frankly. I only think of this because the night I was due to start my new job I completely decked myself on a step and cut my knees open; not only did this completely ruin my outfit for the next day (I was hardly going to wear a skirt, see reasons above) but it also meant I had to put up with another set of pain on top of my heels rubbing - dammit I can walk in them, but I didn't say it wouldn't be painful!
As a woman it is also impossible to talk to a man without their thinking it means you want to sleep with them - okay so sure, teenage boys were like that when we were younger but now it applies to older men too! Not that there's anything wrong with a silver fox but to the train conductor that's on his last hip replacement- never gonna happen, sweetheart.


But the funniest thing about being a woman is recognising all these little traits in other woman, particularly the ones you don't know so well. You see, we all have this miniature race going on - who gets the best job quickest, who gets the long term boyfriend to stay put, who loses that holiday weight first blah blah blah but when you're outwith that race (sometimes for having won it) it's a brilliant sight - I'm jealous of the men that get to laugh at us all day.
You see, when the man bought me a diamond at 18, I knew I'd struck gold (or white-gold) for myself and my friends because if we're ever out and anyone is ever arrogant or rude it somehow just gets dropped into conversation and all of a sudden you see that glazed look in their eyes as they desperately try and figure out what it's worth, where it's from and how quickly they could get one. Now this isn't a vicious thing on woman but, let's be honest there's ones out there you just want to make shut up.


And I get all the back-chat about the 'serious' nature of it all and "you know it won't last, right?"
Do you think that's the point? The point is when we split up I will make a mint pawning it! But, when you split up with your's, all you'll be left with is a gaping hole where your DVD player used to be when he moves his x-box out.


Moral of the story? I need  to start using sweetener.